Every cloud

Last night was speech night for my older daughter.  She got the year 7 prize for French for which I was very proud.  But she was incandescent with rage at receiving a copy of St Expury’s The Little Prince in English.  “I read this in year 2”, she hissed “and Claire bought it for my birthday one year so I already have a copy” she continued to rage “and it’s not even in French”.  Boy, was she pissed off.  Year 7 and already school prizes have lost all their lustre.  I was still proud.

The speech night was held in a hall at UNSW.  All the girls were there with instructions to wear ironed dresses (I ironed a school dress for the first time this year) and new white socks and a white hair ribbon (we struggled a bit with this one).  There was a scratchy orchestra, a rather thin choir and an interminable speech from the new Principal.  My younger daughter had brought a book to read. She finished it, looked up and said “what can she still be talking about?”  The question could not be answered as the whole thing was content free. Not an auspicious debut. When they started on about their strategic plan I was rolling my eyes in horror.  Still, the actual prize giving was mercifully short and well organized but we still didn’t get home until just before 10 which was way too late for younger daughter. 

She and I had a shower together this morning as a way of getting her to wash her hair.  We had been too late the night before and she has her Christmas liturgy this evening.  She has been singing around the house a lot lately and joined in with the choir last night.  I love to hear her sing but am getting the teensiest but tired of hearing just one chorus repeated over and over.

Last Saturday, she and I went to our work children’s Christmas party at LunaPark.  My sister who is in Sydneyvisiting came with us which diluted the effort for me.  I am not a fan of amusement parks and this one is pretty average.  To be honest, I think my girl got more pleasure from the ferry trip than the rides which are best enjoyed in the company of someone else who likes to scream.

I spent Sunday at the beach while younger daughter went to see the HP movie for a birthday party.  It was obviously a successful outing but it was so hot that we just went home and chilled out for the afternoon.

Her father drove up that evening with older daughter.  There has been some tension between us (yeah, like that is new news) and he was flying out to Washington DC on Monday and then onto Torontofor Christmas. I was pretty fed up to find this out via by stepson and to realize that the children would not see him again before Christmas.  After some words, he organized to stay the night in Sydneyon Sunday and took the children to dinner and kept them the night at his apartment.  I had a grown up evening with my friend.  Silver lining, sweetie, silver lining.

Comments

[ab]

Please advise older daughter that I will be hand delivering to her another copy of The Little Prince - in Sanskrit.

[dd]

It sounds like I could hire oldest daughter to be my translator.

I am not a fan of amusement parks either. They can be fun if they are on the water and I have my camera to entertain me.